Sometimes they resurface destroyed. They can seem like beached whales at low tide, meteors in the desert, vehicles after an avalanche.

They roll out from the darkest recesses of nature’s reclamations. It’s as if they’ve been waiting forever to whisper at us with the quietness of death. It’s as if they were kicked out of a cleaner, safer place.

Each gigantic head is a colossal failure, the wish-face of a culture’s pride and fear, a displacement of desires to constitute existence, to materialize a sense of being in the world.

You ensure these repeated efforts are made meaningless. They’re like a wind carving cliffs in sand. Each re-creation moves dumb matter through the years. Every likeness is rendered alien to successive generations.

A repressed decapitation is exposed with the advent of these inventions (perhaps it is you, most of all, who must see it this way). It’s like the return of a murder that hasn’t been remembered, that hasn’t been passed down, that has never been recognized.

Each gigantic head fails in its attempts to kiss the folds of time, to press a unique likeness, an authentic self, a living consciousness, into the malleable walls of historical recollection.

Each metonymic noggin is begging to be vandalized. Each has claimed power as an end.

You kick-in the artifice that props up the possibilities of ego. You could care less. You know gigantic heads are empty.